If you need to promote a webinar, you have to think about much more than just the promotion itself. As a marketer, you need to make sure you bring qualified leads to the funnel. Also, that you educate them and walk with them in their particular journey.
From that point on, you’ll hand them over to the sales team to help the qualified leads buy. If you market a low to mid-ticket B2B product, you’ll probably be in charge of the full marketing and sales cycle. Marketing automation workflows will be a must.
Nowadays, getting people to register for a webinar is not that complicated. Somehow, we all are used to webinar platforms.
So, for your upcoming webinar, these potential customers are basically sharing their email.
They know that they’ll be part of an email list.
They also know you’ll send manual or automated emails.
And they know they can ignore all your emails.
You want more than that.
You want a firm commitment.
This commitment consolidates in the form of time, not just a registration.
Why? Because there are two currencies we humans use to pay for the stuff we care about.
Time and money.
So, if you are thinking about marketing a webinar, you have to think about your lead’s commitment. This means that you need to know more about your audience. Once you know their specifics, you need to focus on facilitating their commitment.
In this article, I’ll share a few concepts, ideas, and webinar best practices to help you promote and market your next webinar. You’ll learn how to consolidate lead commitment using the power of marketing personalization, customer experience, and video marketing.
I’ll do this from a different perspective, focused on the individual. This article will help you establish a mindset that will bring more qualified webinar attendees, resulting in more sales success.
Segment Your Audience With Buyer Personas
If you want to successfully promote a B2B webinar, invest a decent amount of time thinking about your audience. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of resources and time on a marketing activity that has no ROI. You don’t want this to happen. This is why you need buyer personas.
A buyer persona helps you understand your market’s needs. It helps you know what motivates them and how to better persuade them to buy. This also applies to your webinar registration campaign.
This is the way to go if you do B2B account-based marketing.
So, let me ask…
What is your B2B buyer persona?
As a marketing professional, one of your goals is to drive leads to your sales team’s way. Webinars are a wonderful way to do this. But you don’t want just anyone to attend your upcoming webinar.
Your webinar promotion should be centered on potential buyers that are a good fit for your business.
Right?
You want people that are aligned with your sales process according to their particular needs.
There is no way you can get 100% accurate data on your target market. But, lucky you, there are several ways to understand who your potential buyer persona is. This is particularly useful if this information hasn’t been given to you yet.
I’ll talk about how to get there in a moment.
If you want to learn more about marketing segmentation strategies, watch the following video now:
Why Using Buyer Personas to Promote Your Future Webinars
What differentiates a buyer persona from others is where they fit within the buying cycle. This includes the various stages of buying a product or service. It also takes into account the buyer’s thoughts and feelings as they engage with your unique offer. This is why determining your webinar buyer personas is key
When you know your buyer, all you need is a question list. These are the questions your potential buyers ask about whatever your expertise is. These questions will lead you to the webinar topic.
Since you also know the type of personas you want to have present at the webinar, chances are that you can also create a webinar series. This webinar series will answer a variety of questions your marketing leads have.
With this approach, buyer personas are key because they help you shape what’s next in your content strategy and marketing. For example, the questions they ask will help you create marketing copy for your ads, webinar landing page, and email marketing.
So, remember, audience profiles are key determine the most important information that you want your webinar to provide the buyer of the webinar. They are key to write blog posts, social media content, and even making teaser videos based on their concerns and expectations.
92% of B2B marketers consider account-based marketing “extremely” or “very” important to overall marketing efforts (SiriusDecisions). It’s time to this right.
How to Create Customer Personas for Your Next Webinar
Here are a few ideas to help you create customer personas aligned with your marketing and sales goals:
Keep this in mind: It’s always a mix of sources.
This means that you need to think about the specific KPI you want to get out of the webinar strategy. From there, what target audience can help you get there with what you have in place.
Often, taking a look at your customer relationship management software (CRM) will help you know more about your potential buyers.
Type of CRM Data You Can Use To Promote a Webinar
Usually, there are two types of information in a CRM:
- Structured data, such as a First Name and Position.
- Unstructured data. This one is fun. You’ll usually find this one in the sales reps’ notes and comments.
Structured data is often easy to analyze. But unstructured data requires some patience and creativity. But this information is gold. If your sales executives are used to taking good notes, you’ll find a lot of information about questions, concerns, and interests.
This information can help you create a better mental map of your potential customers. And from there, will help you build realistic buyer personas drafts to promote future webinars.
You’ll need to use your intuition. Creativity is a must-have. Don’t do this alone if you can. Talk to other colleagues, analyze social media channels, even how previous email marketing campaigns have performed.
Your direct experience talking to customers will be one of your best tools. If you don’t have the luxury of being in the trenches with your customers, talk to your fellow customer success and support partners.
Avoid wide ranges. Focus on specific audiences that can easily consume relevant content in the form of webinars.
So, without spending thousands in a consultancy firm that can shape the right customer personas for you, you can simply start with your own data. Use your creativity. Go over the comments, questions and concerns you’ll find in your CRM.
Without being a data scientist, you’ll get a pretty useful picture of the people you want in. They are no just email addresses. They are people that are trying to find a solution to their problem. Get in their path with useful video content that talks to them in a personal way.
Planning Your Webinar Marketing Followup
In my opinion, there are three types of leads in terms of webinar marketing:
- Webinar leads that registered but never attend the webinar or even the replay
- Leads that registered and attended the webinar
- Leads that registered, didn’t attend the webinar but watched the webinar replay.
Here is the deal. You want to target them all but should start with those that showed the highest level of commitment. Understanding this is a game-changer if you want to successfully promote a webinar.
Webinar leads that attended the webinar have shown more interest in the webinar content. Plus, depending on the webinar platform you used, interactive webinars help you know even more about this engagement.
Increase Engagement Rate with Interactive Webinars
Then, one of the things you should do when creating a webinar marketing strategy is to plan activities that help you confirm and increase the engagement rate.
Here are three ideas that will help you engage with webinar attendees during a webinar:
- Use poll questions: Polls are easy market research surveys that gather feedback and opinions. Polls help you measure attendee sentiment in real-time while the webinar takes place.
- Ask webinar attendees to download relevant content to complement the webinar teaching. The content should be 100% aligned with what it’s been shared in the webinar to avoid distractions. Use this technique to gather more lead data that can help you segment your audience.
- Create live interactive experiences that motivate people to attend other future webinars. For example, practical webinars where they can easily ask questions.
Remember, buyer personas can also be used to identify areas where you might be missing audience information. If you create an interactive experience, you’ll fill the information gap.
With many online events taking place every week, you need to make sure yours stands out. Webinar attendance rates are challenging. Make sure that part of your webinar strategy focuses on getting people to react during the webinar.
Use Interactive Video Webinar Replay to Increase Engagement
Have you ever tried to tell a story with video content but found it difficult to get people’s attention? Now that you have promoted the webinar to the right audience, use personalized marketing to engage with those that didn’t make it to the webinar.
[Need a guide executing a personalized marketing automation plan? Make sure to check this guide now]
It’s a huge waste of time and money to make videos that never get watched. Create webinar replay videos or even video summaries that are relevant to each attendee.
Send interactive videos with the webinar replay to your webinar leads. Since you have already segmented your audience through buyer personas, you have a better idea of what will trigger their interest.
The following video explains how interactive videos work with personalization:
Use this to add a personalized in-video call-to-action to your videos. Interactive video marketing with personalization helps you make people react. The reason for this is because personalized calls-to-action are about 200% more effective than generic calls-to-actions.
An interactive call-to-action will engage with the viewer. It will push them to the next stage in the funnel or even register and watch the next webinar in the series.
With Pirsonal Player you can easily add personalized calls-to-action to any number of videos at scale and automatically. Pirsonal Player is an interactive video player with a focus on marketing personalization and marketing automation.
Engage with Cold Webinar Leads with Personalized Videos
Personalized videos are unique videos powered by your CRM or marketing data. These types of marketing and customized videos are created automatically using cloud software and are really popular among email automation experts.
Use personalized videos to grab the attention of those leads that didn’t attend the webinar and never viewed the replay video. So, next time you send them a webinar invitation, make sure to automatically personalize a video so that you increase your success rate.
With personalized videos, you can automatically customize each video at scale. These videos can personalize text, images, video clips, and images so that each video is relevant to every lead.
Since at this point you have more customer data, have segmented your audience and your webinar promotion is based on buyer personas, each video will be highly relevant to every lead.
Every personalized video can be presented within a dynamic landing page with personalized content. This increases engagement and makes people stick to your marketing content for a longer period of time.
Video automation software like Pirsonal works smoothly with your marketing arsenal. You can fully automate and integrate this process, regardless of the marketing and customer experience tool you use.
When choosing a personalized video platform, make sure that it provides the integrations you need. This way, you’ll save a lot of time.
The Bottom Line
Webinars represent a great opportunity to know more about your customers and provide more qualified leads to your sales team. To effectively promote a webinar, invest some time understanding your audience, creating buyer personas, and follow-up marketing strategies.
If you do this, you’ll make sure that your webinar marketing strategy is ROI-effective. You’ll also deliver a better customer experience that will help you close more business and build loyalty.